Is Strategic Planning Dead?

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Times, when companies could succeed with a
5 or 10-year-long strategic plans, are gone. The current business environment
calls for agility, meaning strategies must be set for short-term plans and
long-term goals. Firstly, rising competition forces strategists to keep an eye
on their surroundings, and secondly, the shift in working generations, and fast
technological progress has meant that long-term plans can be outdated in only
short time. Does it mean that strategic planning is dead? The traditional
version of it, yes, but if you manage to adapt planning to modern challenges,
execution can happen much faster.

Agility is critical across all corporate
levels as it allows the business to continue growing whilst protecting valuable
assets from disruption. Millennials, who currently shape the largest working
group in the US can help with agility, but at the same time, they shouldn’t
shoulder the burden themselves. The problem lies in constantly changing career
aspirations among many millennials which has caused corporate turnover rates to
increase in the last decade, according to Forbes. If a company operates with a 5+ year plan, creates
a problem.

In particular, it is this problem with
retention which can affect an existing long-term strategy. If the plan, for
example, is in the fourth year of its completion, and key employees decide to
leave the company, the process may be disrupted or slowed as as newcomers need to adapt to
strategic processes, decreasing agility. However, there are still ways to
achieve continuity, one of them is by focusing on corporate culture.

Today, smart leaders plan 3-6 months ahead,
and in order to execute fast, they build a team of cross-functional
professionals. If employees are competent and capable of completing several
tasks simultaneously, executives can stop stressing about the structure of
their business. With a strong and engaged workforce, the corporate ecosystem can
adjust to changing conditions quickly and achieve agility.

As for technology, there is a strong
correlation between employees' capabilities, the speed of execution, and the
software and tech approaches a company uses. Technology has affected the
business world to the extent where it's simply unnecessary and costly to have a
long-term plan. Tech innovations and analytics have come a long way and offer
services and software that can knock at least one or two years from long-term
plans. These allow faster data processing across all business activities - from
sales to supply chain. Digital and cloud solutions then allow the transferal of
the missional critical mechanisms to the digital space, where companies can
operate faster, without geographical borders, and with a more efficient
organizational structure.

With the focus on building a team with improved
working capacities and the use of advanced technology, strategic planning has
evolved from a lot of time-consuming paperwork with vaguely set targets to
dynamic processes where it's clear how the team can hit them. Agility doesn't
resonate with a rigid 5-year plan, nor with the old fashioned methods of
planning, so if companies continue using outdated trends, it's only their
competition who adopt more modern approaches who will benefit.